The Mortifications (13 page)

Are you a guide? Ulises asked.

I can be your guide, she said. Would you like a tour of the Palacio?

Some water first, if that's all right.

Around the girl's shoulder was what seemed like a small purse, and from it she took a thin plastic bottle. It reminded Ulises of a flask, and he drank from it.

How much for the tour? he asked.

Depends on how long we walk together, the girl said.

Can we settle at the end? See how far we go?

The young woman said, Sure, but I will need at least fifty. Ulises agreed. Where would you like to start? she asked.

The statue of the woman, Ulises said. The woman who is the weather vane.

She's beautiful, the girl said. I'm Inez.

Inez took Ulises by the arm and led him inside the Palacio. She brought him to the foot of the stairs that led up to the mezzanine, and there was the statue of Isabel de Bobadilla.

It's named
La Giraldilla,
the girl said. She stepped back from Ulises and pushed gently on his back. She said, You can touch it if you like. It's good luck for travelers.

The statue was four feet tall and had the green hue of old copper, but the torso of the figure looked more like a man's than a woman's. One of the knees pushed outward from beneath the skirt, however, and the exposed thigh—plump and curving, dimpling as it dissolved into the knee—was without doubt that of a woman.

Did she really walk the seawalls?

Just a myth. When Isabel learned that de Soto was dead, she sold all their lands, abandoned Cuba, and returned to Spain. I'm sure she died comfortably in Madrid. But that doesn't mean she wasn't faithful.

Inez asked Ulises what else he'd like to see, and he told her to show him whatever was best and nothing very political. She told him that was nearly impossible. She spoke of the Culture Department and pointed out that even the Palacio they were currently touring had been the governor's mansion during the island's colonial period.

You don't sound very fond of the city, Ulises said.

I'm not from here, Inez told him. I'm going to university. I study Caribbean art history.

You seem to know everything.

Ulises was immediately embarrassed, because he found her attractive, but what he'd said was condescending and empty. Had he not been so sunburned, he thought she would have clearly seen him blushing, but all she said was thank you.

What else? he asked.

Inez took him to the Plaza de Armas, La Habana Vieja, and even the Catedral de San Cristóbal. Ulises had no interest in the Cementerio de Colón or the forts guarding the harbor entrance. They walked between squares and avenues, briefly flirting with a length of the Malecón seawall, but then decided to head inward toward the city's center, where Ulises said the surroundings seemed more recognizable. He even began to think there was a chance he would remember something of his last brief visit.

But though the streets were rife with statues and small shops and memorial plaques, Inez told him every inch of concrete was crumbling. Every day, she told him, another building collapsed. The municipal workers, the contractors, the laborers, could not keep up with the decay. She pointed to a fresh apartment complex abutting a dilapidated church. There, Ulises saw that the sacred walls were caving in.

Two days before his departure, Ulises had hugged Soledad to the point of pain, as if he could not get close enough. There was air between them, the physical space where her breasts once were, and she knew he sensed that absence.

She said to him then, It's all right. I've already forgotten them.

Bullshit, he answered.

She shook her head. It could have been worse, she told him. It could have grown somewhere hard to reach, like my spine. Or it could have been stomach cancer. It could have been in my face, and you might not have recognized me after surgery. I could have lost an eye or maybe my throat from smoking with Henri. I'm lucky.

But despite those rationalizations, and with her son about to leave, Soledad began to feel more desperately her mounting losses. A son in Connecticut, she knew, was probably worth two children in Cuba. But she also knew from being a courthouse auditor that the world was plump with routine loss, and rarely was it the stolen-from who pled a case; lawyers and counsel—surrogates—were always speaking for the aggrieved. The Bible said as much, and this Soledad couldn't ignore, because the pages recovered alongside Uxbal's letter, a few sections from Judges, remained in a plastic bag atop her nightstand. She read them every night before falling asleep:
Now after the death of Joshua it came to pass, that the children of Israel asked the LORD, saying, Who shall go up for us against the Canaanites first, to fight against them? And the LORD said, Judah shall go up: behold, I have delivered the land into his hand.

Soledad wondered if her daughter had memorized the verses, if she read them inside her head—maybe while sleeping on a boat between Central America and Havana? Maybe while walking through a hot city she hadn't seen since she was a child? Maybe when spotting the green hills behind the whitewashed house?—and if they gave her strength. Soledad closed her eyes and saw their home in Buey Arriba, the green countryside replete with cattle. Her vision wasn't nostalgic but primitive. It's an old, old place, she thought, and she remembered the weather of Oriente, the steady climate, the thermometer mercury peaking almost always around twenty-six degrees Celsius. But she knew that Cuba had only the illusion of constancy, and Soledad could not see her daughter entering that space again with ease. A person can't go back to paradise, she thought.

Yet Soledad also remembered the heat rising off the black backs of wandering cows, an appealing warmth when compared to the always-tepid air of St. Anthony's chemo ward. There, in a slick vinyl chair, pale beige machines pumped her full of chemicals. They whirred next to her ears as she suffered for hours the journey of poison through her veins, and they put her in a state of disgust for the modern era. And though anyone would prefer the hot grass of Buey Arriba to an angiocatheter, Soledad, for a brief moment, felt her heart cut in two, one half troubled with regret, the other grateful to discern maybe the same draw homeward, the same current, that Isabel swam in. It felt like commiserating.

Soledad was grateful, though, to have something of her daughter's, maybe even the girl's last prayers before going home, and she got into the habit of delivering verses to the plants in her house when Willems was not around. While Henri was out running errands or talking to doctors or even napping because the night before she'd kept him up with her vomiting, Soledad recited Bible lines emptily, not wanting to understand their meaning but to pretend her voice was Isabel's.
March on, my soul, with might!
But because of the chemotherapy, Soledad's throat was often sore, her voice weak, and what she heard when she spoke was more noise than song.

When she couldn't sing, Soledad found herself touching the places where her nipples used to be. Slipping her hands beneath her blouse, she'd trace her thumbs across the fresh equator of her chest. She'd pull the fabric away from her collarbone and squint, briefly imagining mammary glands, two sumptuous hills, eight more pounds of flesh.

Hands pressed to her scars, Soledad was learning how to miss Ulises as well as Isabel, a doubled longing that mocked the stitched-together plain of winter-yellow skin that now blanketed her sternum. She often reminded herself that though she could have sent Henri—a traveler, a free wanderer, a Haitian citizen, a devoted man, a relentless man—she chose Ulises for his eyes, which were her own. She wanted their glinting familiarity to draw Isabel out of her foggy, abstract faith and back to the skin and bones of her family.

But, truthfully, Soledad couldn't bear to ask another thing from Henri. She should have, before the cancer, before Isabel's disappearance, set him loose. She should have told him to go. She should have told him to save himself. But Henri had more resolve than most people figured—here Soledad remembered the farmers and their lawsuit against the Dutchman—and the cancer was like a promise to him, an opportunity. Where the sex had failed to ignite, they now had the cool, intimate relationship of a caregiver and his charge: Henri helped Soledad to and from her therapies, he washed their bedsheets, and in the shower he helped her reach the nether-regions of her long, luxurious back. He even dried her hair, slowly, with a thick towel instead of the cranky blow dryer, patting at her gray and black strands and not saying a word when they came away with the cotton.

At the same time, Soledad couldn't ignore the fact that she wanted him at her side. Her actions were gutless; she was in need, and he would allow himself to be abused. But, oddly, her demands on his day—nearly all of his work hours, save a few phone calls to his office and his greenhouses—were also something of an apology. Soledad was offering Henri, the more and more she worried about it, the last pathetic minutes of her life. To have asked him to go to Cuba would have been a passive sort of dismissal, the same as whispering,
This is the start of your going away from me.

The aftermath of that decision, the choice to cling to the Dutchman, however, fostered a restless guilt in Soledad's body, and this she could somehow discern from the whole host of side effects—cracked fingernails, swollen toes and knuckles, constipation, memory loss—she suffered from the chemotherapy. The guilt was perhaps the only thriving element under her skin, and it flared like an itch at her elbows and behind her knees, sometimes in her shoulders and ankles. And despite her fatigue, Soledad felt the urge to pace around her room during the day, an impulse to lift plants off windowsills just to release the brief but sharp flashes of anxious energy somehow expressing itself in her joints.

More important, the doctor had told her that her sexual appetite—something that had already seemed lost, absent as her draw to Willems—would disappear for a while, but it had, in fact, resurfaced. Amazingly, she felt it reemerge in the empty space where her breasts should have been, as though she were experiencing phantom limbs. Sometimes she was certain she could even feel the tips of phantom nipples. Her long periods of rest became punctuated with brief moments of inexplicable physical ecstasy. She would wake from a nap, sit up in bed with her eyes shut, and as long as they were shut, she could believe without a doubt that she felt the weight of a woman's chest bearing down on her torso, pulling forward slightly her shoulders as her breasts once did. She'd not dare touch herself but waited, instead, sometimes for an hour, for the sensation to fade.

Drenched in her own excited sweat, she'd say to herself, They're hallucinations, really wonderful hallucinations.

But she didn't ask her doctor about them, and she didn't tell anyone, neither Henri nor Ulises, about the episodes. She wouldn't admit they were anything but the natural expressions of a body losing itself, the sane, expected motions of a system in shock. She told herself repeatedly, The dreams will fade. This phase will pass.

Yet Soledad found she could not keep her resurrected libido a secret from Henri. In bed and despite how upside-down she felt from the second round of chemotherapy, she turned her desires onto the Dutchman. Her hands were relentless in the dark, and they found not only the Dutchman's penis, but also his armpits, his anus, his earlobes, and
his
nipples. Soledad discovered an extreme pleasure in twisting the Dutchman's areolas with her thumb and middle finger as a way to rouse him in the middle of the night, and grasping at his chest while suffering blindly the phantom weight of her absent breasts was satiating in a way that Soledad could not understand. If she believed in religion still, she might have called it a religious experience, though the joy of it was too consistent, too regular, for anything she would ever attribute to God.

Sometimes Henri shot up in pain, and once, just once, he'd instinctively punched her in the side of the head—he was only half awake and had no idea what he was doing. This somehow encouraged rather than deterred Soledad, and she found she welcomed the pain, the throbbing consequence. As a result, she made it her mission to provoke the Dutchman whenever she wanted his skin, to not only get him hard, but to bear down on him like a hurricane. The trials of her body, its aches and weaknesses, were, as a result, sacrificed to the gust of pleasure the memory of her chest had blown. Each midnight romp became a mixture of pain and suffering and undeniable, utterly unpredictable satisfaction.

For Henri, it was as if the Holy Ghost was entering the bedroom in the middle of the night to abuse his whole being. It was as if he was being burned alive by a strange faith, and under the sheets he whispered or shouted, Jesus God! Regardless, he let Soledad do whatever it was she wanted, and often enough he was aroused; feeling isolated for so long from her, he was eager to oblige.

But Henri found that Soledad wanted not only to make him hard, but for him to then turn on her, to take over the act. She might slap his erect penis and then moan when he was rough with her neck or pinched her clitoris. It was cruel, Willems thought, and not to her but to him; their lovemaking had turned into a reciprocating submission of the will, and this was not the equitable love he'd grown accustomed to. He could only imagine—and this from remembering the slow death of his own mother—that in the darkness of life giving out, that one wants more than anything to be taken over, to be overwhelmed. It was a way of letting go, and if something, God or belief or ghosts, swept in to carry you off, then there was another life to go to. It was a test of faith, and Soledad's faith, Willems believed, was so fierce and violent because of how long she'd kept it submerged. In the absence of Isabel and Ulises, Henri thought it had awoken, and it seemed to want to make an offering of both her body and his. The Dutchman had not forgotten the quiet, unresolved disturbance between them, but he was also amazed by the limitlessness of their consensual torture. They had come to an implicit agreement in bed, in the wet, earthy air of their plant-ridden bedroom: the body could not last, it would not last, and therefore it was ripe for sacrifice.